Tag Archive: film review

I was a fan of Roger Ebert for about 15 years, read a few of his books (including his memoir) and followed his blog, so there isn’t much about him in Life Itself that I didn’t know already, apart from some very touching, candid scenes of him during the last four months of his life. But that’s okay.

Eventually I may go back to try to figure out why The Lord of the Rings trilogy works so well and this one doesn’t. Desolation of Smaug, like last year’s An Unexpected Journey, gets the job done well enough. I’m not mad at it. But by the time “The Two Towers” was over more than a decade ago I was fully enthralled. Not so much here.

Very much like Girls on HBO, and while it took me a little over a season to warm up to Hannah Horvath, it only took me about an hour to come around to Frances (Greta Gerwig). Difficult for me to connect to this character early on and for similar reasons: she’s pathologically unwilling to take responsibility for herself, and it’s hard to sympathize with that because she doesn’t really have to struggle, and she knows it. As one character says, “The only people who can afford to be artists in New York are rich.” She, like a few of the others in the film, has the comfort of knowing she has a fallback position if playing the starving artist doesn’t pan out.

It’s refreshing to see a gay film this frankly erotic (if I could sit through Blue is the Warmest Color, straight people can sit through this), and it’s effective at creating a sinister atmosphere, but there comes a turn in the story after which I didn’t buy a moment that followed. The protagonist’s decisions ceased to make sense to me, and I kept waiting for the film to reconcile that, but it never did, so I left frustrated and unsatisfied.

This reminded me of Shame in an interesting way: both are about troubling sexual behaviors, but neither is interested in the motivation behind those behaviors — or at least, not interested in explaining them to us.